Swift, J.P. Morgan and BofA usher in faster international money transfer. Swift, a financial-messaging platform, said its new international money-transfer service is now live in the United States, with Bank of America Corp. and J.P. Morgan online with the service. The move follows recent launches in Canada and Germany. Swift says the new service will show recipients the full transaction amount with no unexpected deductions. It offers the potential for most funds to be received within minutes, dependent on local banking-system support, and features upfront pricing, with all fees and the exchange rates known before the sender presses "confirm." Actual funds move through participating financial institutions. Initially, the messaging service will be available for payments from Australia, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, and Turkey, Swift says. World Bank data show that remittances sent to recipients in the United States totaled $9 billion in 2025. As of 2022, U.S. senders sent $79.15 billion, nearly double the next-highest sending country, Saudi Arabia. at $39.35 billion. "Swift's framework is a meaningful step forward in providing greater transparency, speed and predictability for international transfers, and we look forward to helping bring these benefits - and greater choice - to our clients," AJ McCray, BofA head of global payments products, says in a statement. Swift's entire network includes more than 11,500 participants in more than 200 countries.

KB Kookmin Bank to launch JPMorgan blockchain payment service. New cross-border solution targets importers and exporters with near real-time settlements. Reading Time: 3 mins read KB Kookmin Bank announced that it will introduce a blockchain-based payment service for importers and exporters next month, expanding its cross-border transaction capabilities through JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s Kinexys blockchain payments infrastructure. The launch follows a business partnership established between KB Kookmin Bank and JPMorgan to enhance blockchain-powered remittance services. The initiative represents the first time that a South Korean financial institution has integrated Kinexys by J.P. Morgan into payment services designed specifically for import and export businesses. KB Kookmin Bank will become the first South Korean bank to deploy JPMorgan's Kinexys blockchain payments network for trade-related cross-border payments, aiming to improve the speed and efficiency of international transactions for importers and exporters. Service marks the first use of JPMorgan's Kinexys network by a South Korean bank for trade payments. The new offering is expected to streamline international payment processes by leveraging blockchain technology for institutional financial transactions. The collaboration reflects growing interest among banks in adopting distributed ledger technology to improve settlement efficiency, reduce processing delays, and enhance transparency in cross-border payments. Kinexys serves as JPMorgan's blockchain-focused business unit and provides blockchain-based payment infrastructure for institutional clients worldwide. The platform is connected to the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT), enabling it to support international remittances and foreign exchange settlements across participating financial institutions. According to the bank, the blockchain-enabled network is capable of processing international payments and foreign exchange transactions in near real time while operating continuously throughout the day. Unlike traditional banking systems that are often constrained by business hours, weekends, and regional holidays, the infrastructure allows transactions to be processed automatically on a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week basis. The adoption of blockchain infrastructure is expected to offer businesses engaged in international trade greater flexibility when managing overseas payments. Faster settlement times may also improve liquidity management for importers and exporters that rely on timely fund transfers to support supply chain operations and commercial transactions. Initially, KB Kookmin Bank plans to provide the service through its domestic branch network in South Korea as well as its branch in Singapore. During the first phase of the rollout, the platform will support remittances denominated in U.S. dollars, with the possibility of broader currency support as the service develops. The blockchain-powered payment platform will initially process U.S. dollar remittances through KB Kookmin Bank's South Korean and Singapore branches while operating continuously with near real-time settlement capabilities. The service will be available across 10 countries, providing businesses with access to blockchain-enabled cross-border payment services in South Korea, the United States, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, India, Thailand, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and South Africa. The geographic coverage is intended to support companies engaged in international trade across key commercial corridors in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and North America. The rollout underscores a broader trend among global financial institutions to incorporate blockchain technology into traditional banking infrastructure, particularly for cross-border payment services that have historically involved multiple intermediaries and extended settlement times. By integrating blockchain with established international payment networks such as SWIFT, banks are seeking to modernize international fund transfers while maintaining compatibility with existing financial systems. By combining JPMorgan's Kinexys blockchain infrastructure with the global SWIFT network, the new service is designed to deliver faster, automated, and more efficient cross-border payments for businesses conducting international trade across 10 markets.

Ramp launches stablecoin accounts to challenge SWIFT's $180 trillion dominance. Ramp's new stablecoin accounts integrate digital asset and fiat payments into one platform, targeting the $150-$180 trillion annual SWIFT settlement corridor. Ramp, the corporate spend management platform, has moved decisively into digital asset infrastructure by launching stablecoin accounts and payment capabilities for its business customers - a product that places it squarely in the path of the correspondent banking corridors through which an estimated US$150 trillion to US$180 trillion flows annually via the SWIFT network. The launch represents one of the most direct integrations of stablecoin rails into mainstream corporate finance tooling to date, and signals a broader maturation of digital asset infrastructure as a viable alternative to legacy cross-border settlement systems. At the heart of the new offering is a unified spend management platform that brings together fiat and digital asset transactions under a single interface. Rather than requiring treasury teams to toggle between a conventional banking portal and a separate crypto custody or payments layer, Ramp's product allows companies to settle cross-border transactions over stablecoin rails while continuing to use traditional payment methods - all within the same operational environment. For finance teams managing global vendors, contractors, or subsidiaries, the practical implication is significant: the friction, cost, and delay typically associated with international wire transfers can, in theory, be substantially reduced without abandoning the fiat-denominated accounting and reporting workflows that compliance and audit functions depend upon. The scale of the opportunity Ramp is positioning itself to address cannot be overstated. The SWIFT network's annual throughput of between $150 trillion and $180 trillion underscores just how deeply embedded legacy correspondent banking is in the global commercial economy. That figure encompasses everything from multinational payroll flows and commodity trade settlements to interbank liquidity transfers. Yet the system carries well-documented inefficiencies: multi-day settlement windows, opaque intermediary fee structures, and currency conversion losses that disproportionately affect mid-market companies lacking the negotiating leverage of large financial institutions. Stablecoins - typically dollar-pegged digital tokens operating on public or permissioned blockchains - have emerged as a technically credible alternative for point-to-point settlement precisely because they can move value in near real-time, at any hour, without the correspondent banking chain that adds both cost and latency to traditional wires. What has historically prevented their wider adoption in corporate treasury is not technical inadequacy but integration complexity: the absence of seamless on-ramps, off-ramps, and unified accounting treatment within enterprise finance platforms. Ramp's product launch is a direct response to that gap. The competitive context is equally important. Wise Business, Ripple, and a growing cohort of blockchain-native payment networks have spent the better part of a decade chipping away at SWIFT's dominance in the mid-market cross-border segment. More recently, stablecoin payment infrastructure companies have attracted significant institutional interest, and major card networks including Visa and Mastercard have built stablecoin settlement pilots of their own. What distinguishes Ramp's approach is the distribution angle: rather than building a standalone stablecoin payments product and asking businesses to integrate it, Ramp is embedding the capability inside a spend management platform that companies already use for corporate cards, expense management, and accounts payable workflows. The path to adoption is therefore markedly shorter. For businesses operating across multiple jurisdictions, the appeal is tangible. A technology company paying engineering contractors across Southeast Asia, Latin America, or Eastern Europe faces a compounding set of inefficiencies each payment cycle - currency spreads, intermediary bank fees, unpredictable settlement timing, and the administrative overhead of reconciling transactions across multiple banking relationships. A unified platform that settles those payments over stablecoin rails while presenting fiat-equivalent balances and standard accounting exports addresses each of those pain points simultaneously. What this means for corporate treasury and the payments landscape. Ramp's stablecoin accounts launch is less a novelty product than a structural signal about where corporate financial infrastructure is heading. The integration of digital asset settlement into mainstream spend management platforms marks a threshold moment: stablecoins are no longer an asset class to speculate on or a curiosity for crypto-native firms, but a payments rail that mainstream enterprise software providers are now actively embedding into their core offerings. As regulatory frameworks around stablecoins continue to develop - particularly in the United States and the European Union, where the Markets in Crypto-Assets regulation is now in force - institutional comfort with stablecoin-based settlement will only grow. The question for incumbent payment networks and correspondent banks is no longer whether stablecoin competition will materialise, but how quickly enterprise platforms like Ramp will accelerate its adoption at scale. With $150 to $180 trillion in annual SWIFT volume as the addressable backdrop, even a marginal shift in market share translates into an enormous redistribution of settlement flows. Elena rosato. Italian fintech analyst. Covers EU payment regulation and the Mediterranean banking sector. § Comments Open discussion no account needed